Weizmann Institute of Science
Our brain has On and Off switches for all its activities, and maintaining a balance between the two is crucial for our health and well-being. For instance: Epileptic seizures occur when the On signals run amok in the cortex, while people with Parkinson’s disease have difficulty using their muscles because of an excess of Off signals in the brain’s motor regions. In memory circuits, an overzealous On can force irrelevant memories upon us, as in posttraumatic stress disorder, whereas an overly active Off can prevent us from remembering anything at all.
In a new study reported in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), researchers at the Weizmann Institute of Science, in collaboration with scientists from the University of Tübingen, have revealed how the brain keeps the On-Off balance steady. They discovered that this balance is programmed into the basic mechanisms through which individual neurons connect with one another.
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Students take part in a lesson in their makeshift outdoor classroom in the coastal city of Ashkelon, February 11, 2021. (AP Photo/Tsafrir Abayov)
The coronavirus cabinet was set to meet on Monday to discuss a further easing of restrictions in the education system, as COVID-19 cases continued to plummet.
Ministers were expected to discuss scrapping the requirement for grades 5-9 to learn in classes of limited size from as soon as next week.
Last week, ministers canceled the requirement for fourth graders to study in “pods,” as well as the requirement for students to present a health declaration signed by their parents to enter the classroom.
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Ectogenesis: ethical challenges in creating artificial wombs
Appeared in BioNews 1090
Three new reports in Nature illuminate the potential to transform artificial wombs from a laboratory tool into a procedure to grow and maintain a human embryo from fertilisation until birth.
Two papers reported the generation of human blastocysts by culturing non-embryonic cells under specific conditions to transform them into blastocyst-like structures, called blastoids. In one study scientists treated stem cells derived from an established stem cell line with specific growth factors to generate the blastoids. In the second study, scientists used adult skin cells to reprogram them into blastoids.
In the same issue, Nature reported that scientists have developed an artificial womb that allows the development of early mouse embryos into a fetus that contained fully formed organs. In this study, scientists at Weizmann Institute of Science implanted mouse blastocysts into their artificial place